Essay: Inequality and the Dismantling of Citizenship in Latin America
Vilas, Carlos
The components of democratic citizenship do not easily coexist with extreme and persistent inequality. Rather, they tend to get distorted in ways that pose serious problems for the practice of...
...shrinking public budgets are driving museums and libraries into complete disarray...
...In Argentina, for example, CEOs earn 7% more than their U.S...
...flexible" labor relations that enable business firms to fire workers with no advance notice or compensation...
...Index numbers, 1990 = 100) Year GDP Productivity (1) Wages (2) Un mp(3yment () 1990 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 1991 108.9 115.0 101.4 73.4 1992 118.4 128.0 102.7 77.9 1993 125.5 138.0 101.3 123.4 1994 133.6 148.0 102.0 128.6 1995 126.9...
...257-268...
...equality of rights and obligations of all individrent approach...
...According to the most recent estimates of the UN's Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), there were 209 million Latin Americans living in poverty in 1994, up from 197 million in 1990, a 6% increase...
...7 In a recent survey conducted in the Dominican Republic, for example, the demand for strongmen and for authoritarian solutions was most common in the most vulnerable segments of the population-among lower-income respondents, among the less educated, among women more than among men and among blacks much more than among whites...
...colleagues even though Argentina's percapita GDP is one third that of the United States...
...27-31...
...drivers passing through red lights and bribing police officers...
...Huge and usually increasing social distances between the richest and the poorest conspire against solidarity...
...The self empowerment of the people, moving from clientism to a full-fledged citizenship, is the only way out of these authoritarian democracies, and the only escape from authoritarianism in general...
...Figures on income disparities suggest that while the elites have abundant and sometimes excessive access to such resources, increasing majorities of the Latin American population are deprived of them...
...In the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, unemployment increased from 602,718 (12.1% of the labor force) in 1994 to 953,632 (18.8%) in 1995...
...The highest levels of social inequality are found in Latin America, with 14 out of 17 countries ranking higher than much poorer countries in Asia and Africa...
...Personal ties substitute for impersonal institutional loyalties...
...34-51...
...6. See Carlos Marichal, "The Rapid Rise of the Neobanqueros," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...34-51...
...Because the loans that these agencies offer are politically conditioned, many government officials consider themselves no longer accountable to their citizens but to the lending agencies themselves...
...2. Research on CEO salaries conducted by the consulting firm Towers Perrin, Pigina 12 (Buenos Aires), February 16, 1997...
...6, May/June 1997, pp...
...The 1995 rate of female unemployment was even higher at 22.3%.1 Both growth and recession, then, had clear class implications...
...In the upper levels of the social order it is quite obvious that "one person" has access to much more than one vote: we are dealing here with corporate power...
...These conditions are sorely lacking in most of our "really existing" democracies...
...Poverty is usually accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness which in turn is reinforced by the objective insecurity pervading everyday life in poor neighborhoods...
...In these circumstances, the egalitarian democratic principle of "one person, one vote" is devoid of any relevant meaning...
...141-159...
...accountability, or the he executive branch of assumption of responsibility for one's deeds and their countability of public consequences upon others (which must apply to public on and civilian control officials as well as to private individuals...
...empathy, or NACILA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 58ESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY the ability to place oneself in settings and situations beyond one's locality or everyday horizon...
...This is particularly true in countries where class and ethnic domination 57ESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY coincide, such as in Brazil and trary to the neoliberal idea that nomic growth leads by itself to i geneity, we see that countries s rate of growth as Mexico, the Dc Nicaragua have similar levels o the case of Ecuador when compa Figure 3 highlights an addition American inequality...
...TI poverty is taking place in coun elections and have more or I among political parties...
...They enjoy more than autonomy...
...Real wages, however, remained virtually frozen and unemployment skyrocketed...
...XXX, No...
...There is certainly a great deal of freedom and autonomy among the richest 20% of the Brazilian households which collectively earn 67.5% of the country's national income, or among their colleagues in Guatemala, who get 63% of the pie...
...ngoing celebration of quently house authoritarian power relations...
...7, No...
...2, April 1996, pp...
...This is what the Mexican anthropologist Guillermo de la Pefia calls "negotiated corporatism...
...It has been the task and the success of a whole range of social movements to open up the rights and obligations of citizenship to larger proportions of the adult population, emancipating both citizenship and democracy from class, gender and racial boundaries...
...The commonwealth is no longer common: it has been privatized and belongs to the wealthiest...
...al., La cultura politica de los dominicanos (Santiago de los Caballeros: Pontificia Universidad Cat6lica Madre y Maestra, 1995...
...supporters g-democracy" debates L .- can be thought of as the political regime of citn the strictly political izenship...
...In turn, allegiance to an international governing class and to the corporate world has replaced citizenship in the ranks of the very wealthy...
...In addi- uals in a particular polity...
...and finally an idea or assumption of a shared belonging to something that is common to all citizens (the res publica, as the Romans called it, or the English commonwealth...
...This is particularly clear on the lower rungs of the social ladder, and is increasingly present among segments of the middle class...
...See also Mercedes Gonz6lez de la Rocha, The Resources of Poverty: Women and Survival in a Mexican City (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1994...
...I would like to suggest a differ tion to open competitive election the effective observance of the autonomy of the judicial from th government...
...Efficacy here refers to the ability of subordinate individuals to manage themselves in non-democratic power structures and social networks...
...Business elites "able 1 over military and security forces...
...police brutality in their dealings with the poor and the political opposition...
...3. See Guillermo O'Donnell, "Illusions About Consolidation," Journal of Democracy, Vol...
...It would be misleading to conclude that authoritarianism lies deep in the hearts and minds of the poor...
...In Peru, for example, a vast majority of the most deprived population re-elected Alberto Fujimori in 1995, while in Brazil the poor opted for Fernando Collor de Mello in 1990, and for Fernando Henrique Cardoso in 1995...
...In such polarized social settings, to speak of equality is plain mockery...
...Patronclient relations of domination and subordination tend to substitute for relations among equals...
...Public education is shrinking due to privatization...
...On the lower levels, of course, "one person" does mean "one vote," although post-electoral pirouettes by government officers frequently empty voting of its ability to achieve the goals the majority of the electorate is pursuing...
...7. Guillermo de la Peha, "Estructura e historia: La viabilidad de los nuevos sujetos," in Transformaciones sociales y acciones global financial community and to multilateral agencies like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB...
...Take the case of Carlos Slim, the wealthiest man in Mexico, whose estimated $6.1 billion of assets include controlling interest in the Mexpican telepnhnnp point Telmex well nR mninr shares of the nation's largest bank and most profitable financial firm...
...NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICASESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY and the "global superhighway" is out of reach of those who do not have access to a home phone-not to speak of the cost of equipment...
...to be democratic-for competition-by the T iberal democracy-the purported goal of Latin acy" literature of the American political elites and their U.S...
...A retreat to "primordial ties"-as anthropologist Clifford Geertz termed them--takes place which substitutes for the "imagined communities" of nation, state or anything falling beyond the frontiers of everyday life...
...Sources: Argentina's Government Statistics Authority (INDEC) and ECLAC...
...For most educated and concerned citizens, voting may be associated with general proposals country, what to do with foreign trade, how to manage the foreign debt, what strategy of poverty alleviation is best suited to the situation, and so on...
...In Argentina, for example, between 1990 and 1994, the so-called "golden years" of the convertibility program of Carlos Menem and Domingo Cavallo, the gross domestic product (GDP) increased by one third-some $100 billion-Carlos M. Vilas is a sociologist and historian at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and a member of NACLA's editorial board...
...5. See Claus Offe, Contradicciones en el estado de bienestar (Madrid: Alianza, 1990), pp...
...In conditions of extreme poverty, formal citizenship may mask a retreat toward patron-client political relations, while democratic institutions freECONOMIC GROWTH, LABOR PRODUCTIVITY, WAGES AND UNEMPLOYMENT IN ARGENTINA...
...It is a dimension of political power, nurtured by escapist fare from most of the media networks, and neoliberal assistance programs like Mexico's oncecelebrated PRONASOL, which oscillate between repression and the co-optation of independent popular organizations...
...VoL XXXI, No 1 JULY/AUG 1997 61ESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY the law is not just a subjective or psychological feeling...
...6, May/June 1997, pp...
...nal dimension of Latin s the after-tax average ficers (CEOs) of the 21 selected countries ta GDP...
...And con"market-friendly" econcreased social homoo divergent in size and ominican Republic and f inequality, as is also ared to Argentina...
...al., eds., The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp...
...Vilas, et...
...The tenhe current growth in sions between inequality and impoverishment on the tries that hold regular one hand, and democratic politics on the other, can have ess open competition a devastating effect on the latter...
...yiyl- l , i"Everyone for her or himself' has replaced the commitments to a shared belonging to the polity...
...Herman Heller, Escritos politicos (Madrid: Alianza, 1985), pp...
...Under the conditions of neoliberal restructuring, the processes and institutions that can foster a broader social empathy-education, accessible information, community-based organizations-are becoming smaller and less accessible...
...Having a friend or a relative who holds some powerful position tends to be more conducive to the achievement of specific goals-getting access to a health clinic or a job, having the roads paved or the garbage collected--than the entitlements granted by citizenship rights...
...Nowhere is as in the four Latin e chart...
...4. See Carlos M. Vilas, "Participation, Inequality, and the Whereabouts of Democracy," in D. Chalmers, C.M...
...VoL XXXI, No 1 JuLY/AUG 1997 Personal autonomy refers to physical freedom as well as access to some basic resources that allow for a minimum of self determination: a decently paid job, education and access to information, sustainable living conditions, and the like...
...Market, State, and Revolutions in Central America (Monthly Review Press, 1995...
...4, January/February 1997, pp...
...See also Steven Volk, "'Democracy' Versus 'Democracy'," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...GDP figures are from World Bank, World Economic Report 1996 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1996...
...4. See Carlos M. Vilas, "Participation, Inequality, and the Whereabouts of Democracy," in D. Chalmers, C.M...
...This can be seen more ountries are governed clearly if we consider the question of citizenship...
...Cross-country mobility is curtailed by the privatization of transportation, increasing fares and decreasing family income, and even statefunded tourism programs are a thing of the past due to cutbacks in social spending...
...151-167...
...See also Steven Volk, "'Democracy' Versus 'Democracy'," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Mitchell Seligson, Political Culture in Nicaragua: Transitions 1991-1995, Monograph, Washington, D.C., December 1995...
...In this environment, the ballot becomes something like the credit card of the poor...
...cheating "the sovereign people" looks like standard operating procedure in marketfriendly democracies...
...al., Chapultepec Five Years Later: El Salvador's Political Reality and Uncertain Future (Boston: Hemispheric Initiatives, 1997...
...100.9 234.9 (1) Output per hour (2) Average real wage (3) Open unemployment...
...Yet this move from subordination to citizenship is neither spontaneous nor inevitable...
...These c by regimes that are considered their regular elections and open so-called "transitions-to-democr 1980s and by the "consolidatin taking place today...
...5. See Claus Offe, Contradicciones en el estado de bienestar (Madrid: Alianza, 1990), pp...
...We have seen this develop in a number of countries...
...Democratic accountability has been eroded even further as the national elites have become more accountable to the 1. International Labor Organization, Yearbook of Labor Statistics 1996 (Geneva: ILO, 1996), p. 389...
...S5o Paulo: Schwarcz, 1992...
...6-12...
...Figure 1 presents a rough measure of social inequality in 17 Latin American and Caribbean countries in the early 1990s, and compares them to several countries in Asia and Africa, as well as the United States...
...As with everything in politics-and in human life-it has to be brought about by need, desire and commitment...
...The much-discussed crisis of political parties is in part the result of this immense social polarization...
...Different types of inequality, stemming from class, gender, race, regional and even religious differences, tend to overlap, creating extremely rigid social structures...
...Rather, they tend to get distorted in some of the following ways...
...6-12...
...In Figure 2, we see that this income inequality was a feature of the Latin American landscape well before the advent of neoliberal restructuring...
...al., eds., The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp...
...Under conditions of extreme inequality, empathy recedes to close affective ties: the family or kin group, locality, religious or ethnic groups...
...See a lengthy discussion of this point in Carlos M. Vilas, "Are There Left Alternatives...
...Deep and persistent social inequalities have distorted the nature of both economic growth and recession in Latin America...
...It compare earnings of chief executive of largest private corporations in with those countries' per capi income polarization so extreme American countries shown on th...
...In part, this is because there is much more cumulative inequality in Latin America than in other regions...
...It is the authoritarian nature of post-adjustment settings which, in the absence of viable and credible progressive alternatives, biases the options of the masses toward a variety of authoritarian options.12 When there is no foreseeable longrun and inclusive alternative, people have no option but to seek immediate, short-term solutions, how to run the particularly when these solutions provide today's job or tomorrow's food...
...7, No...
...does not include underemployment...
...It also requires ac officials, free access to informati Guatemala...
...See Francisco Weffort, Qual democracia...
...Citizenship, in turn, is made up of some basic, early inadequate, and interrelated components including, minimally, the folof "democratic transi- lowing: individual autonomy, involving personal freeial caudillo politics or dom vis-h-vis all other individuals as well as individual cratic formalities with freedom and rights vis-ei-vis state power and powerholders...
...27-31...
...In addition to these minimal political conditions, genuine democracy requires access to certain socioeconomic conditions such as education, jobs, health care and housing, which allow for the effective practice of citizenship...
...It becomes extremely difficult, if at all possible, for the poor to decipher landscapes beyond their daily lives and troubles and their immediate localities...
...His most recent book is Between Earthquakes and Volcanoes...
...Mexico's CEOs earn 12% more than those in France, while France's per-capita GDP is nearly six times that of Mexico...
...XXX, No...
...What kind of personal autonomy is experienced by the job- less, the homeless, the poorest 40% of the Latin American population who get only 5.7% of their country's income in Mexico, 5% in Venezuela, 7% in Brazil, 4.9% in Chile, 2.7% in Guatemala and 4.9% in Colombia...
...In its very beginnings, citizenship was accessible to just a tiny proportion of individuals-free, literate, adult, propertied, native-born males...
...In this relationship, power becomes unrestricted, and the masses look for some basic security for the future...
...In addition to their conventional political and economic objectives, most Latin American parties and unions once traditionally performed a number of social-assistance functions with regard to jobs, education, health care and the like...
...In this context, one of the keyand most difficult-steps of political organizing is the process of convincing people that their own efforts can be fruitful in putting an end to their daily suffering...
...Electoral participation went up to more than 73%, 1- In settings of perceived powerlessness, impunity substitutes for accountability...
...7. Guillermo de la Peha, "Estructura e historia: La viabilidad de los nuevos sujetos," in Transformaciones sociales y acciones colectivas (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mbxico, 1994), pp...
...3-42...
...In this setting, voting may harbor quite a different meaning from that discussed in conventional political theory...
...efficacy, or the ability (and the s, democracy requires perceived ability) to achieve desired outcomes through rule of law and the one's direct or indirect efforts...
...From these efforts have come the movements for human rights, labor rights, freedom of information, women's rights, ethnic and racial pluralism, peasant access to land, the rule of law and environmental protection...
...3 But even i sphere, these approaches are cl there is evidence that a number tions" have retreated to tradition to regimes which combine demo authoritarian rule...
...8 A direct, non-mediated political relationship tends then to develop between the impoverished masses and the power holders...
...As the German political scientist Herman Heller stressed, the very idea of a shared code of meanings involving everyone in the polity usually retreats when confronted with structural inequality and exclusionary development.13 Like empathy, shared belonging is learned through processes and institutions...
...open or poorly hidden corruption at all levels of government administration...
...Quite the contrary is true on the lower floors of the social edifice...
...There is, of course, a constitutional framework of legal equality, yet when socioeconomic and cultural disparities reach extreme levels, effective inequality tends to dominate legal equality...
...Loss of political and social efficacy is neither a spontaneous nor a "natural" phenomenon...
...Mexico's very high electoral absenteeism, on the other hand, receded sharply in the July 1994 presidential elections when electoral competition grew, opposition parties gained more room for conducting their campaigns, international observers were allowed to oversee the voting, and there was a feeling among the public that the coming elections could bring a change in their lives...
...The belief that there will be no punishment for violations of a historical record...
...Rather, they tend to get distorted in ways that pose serious problems for the practice of democracy...
...Jack Spence, et...
...There is then a frequent overlap of electoral support for strongmen or caudillo-type candidates, and electoral absenteeism...
...Political indifference, however, is higher among people with no schooling (52%), among elementary-school dropouts (49%) and among those in the lower economic strata (47%).9 A similar disdain for politics has been found in surveys on political culture in both Nicaragua and El Salvador.l 0 Consequently, high electoral absenteeism should come as no surprise: 60% in the Salvadoran congressional and municipal elections in March 1997, and 40% in the first round of the socalled "elections of the century" in 1994...
...Here, voting is an ingredient of an overall system of tradeoffs between the haves and the have-nots, an instrument to achieve specific resources like schooling, jobs, personal security, land titles, and the like...
...Since state resources-compensating for the rigidities and shortcomings of the market-are not sufficient to reach the entire population in need, a poor-against-poor competiti access to much needed resources...
...The very vulnerability of people in poverty reinforces their search for someone else's efficacy, and personal relations take precedence over entitlements...
...In none of these cases was the successful candidate backed by a full-fledged political party or by labor unions...
...3. See Guillermo O'Donnell, "Illusions About Consolidation," Journal of Democracy, Vol...
...6 Are Slim's political power and efficacy restricted to just the ballot he casts every two or three years...
...5 The inability of political parties to process and respond to the demands and expectations of the impoverished without contesting the overall imprint of market-dominated restructuring reinforces people's alienation from conventional representative democratic institutions...
...Something similar can be said with regard to the increasing inability of unions to represent and mobilize the growing numbers of the un- and under-employed, and those expelled from formal labor markets because of transnational sub59ESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY contracting, "flexibilization" and other forms of labor discipline...
...Most of the agenda for the promotion of effective democracy has been prompted by the efforts of people to organize themselves in the face of repression from governments and scorn from conservative intellectuals...
...These elites, as the Brazilian sociologist Octavio lanni once put it, behave not as rulers, but as conquerors...
...264-285...
...It is hard for people expelled from formal education and without access to basic social resources such as health care, a decent house-even a decent room-because of joblessness and poverty, to feel like members of the same social setting than those having them in excess...
...In the recent past the Latin American poor have been active participants in revolutionary struggles in Central America, as well as in democratization processes in South America and the Caribbean...
...in those four countries enjoy higher levels of T income than many of their colleagues in much more developed countries...
...4 Although electoral procedures and party competition may be found in settings of massive poverty and profound inequalities, poverty and inequality tend to distort the effective meanings of democracy and citizenship...
...9. Institute of Social Research/UNAM, Los mexicanos de los noventas (Mexico City: IIS/UNAM, 1996...
...By contrast, after the "tequila effect" of Mexico's December 1994 peso crisis rippled through Argentina, the country's GDP shrank by 4.6%, while unemployment almost doubled (see Table 1...
...Workers gained little during the boom and lost much more than their employers during the crisis...
...2 The region's persistently high levels of poverty and inequality pose some problems for the o Latin American democracy...
...A Debate from Latin America," in Leo Panitch, ed., The Socialist Register 1996 (London: Merlin Press, 1996), pp...
...2, April 1996, pp...
...1. International Labor Organization, Yearbook of Labor Statistics 1996 (Geneva: ILO, 1996), p. 389...
...1"9095...
...VOL XXXI, No 1 JULIuAuG 1997 and labor productivity grew by 50...
...Hardly...
...6. See Carlos Marichal, "The Rapid Rise of the Neobanqueros," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Loss of efficacy takes place in at least two interrelated levels: with regard to one's individual ability to achieve personal goals, and with regard to politics as a way to cope with collective conflicts and troubles...
...These inequalities in personal autonomy have a powerful impact upon efficacy...
...3-42...
...151-167...
...2. Research on CEO salaries conducted by the consulting firm Towers Perrin, Pigina 12 (Buenos Aires), February 16, 1997...
...It is the wealthy, on the other hand, who are the first to benefit from growth through access to credit and foreign exchange as well as tax exemptions and other government benefits...
...As field research has found, this is not the case in the world of poverty...
...Because of neoliberal restructuring-including budget cuts and union busting-these social-welfare functions have largely disappeared...
...According to a nation-wide survey conNACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS 0 I 1--ESSAY/DEMOCRACY AND INEQUALITY ducted at the Institute of Social Research of Mexico's National University (UNAM), 29% of the Mexicans interviewed never talk about politics...
...8. Isis Duarte, et...
...XXX, No...
...Figure 3 CEOs INCOME / GNP PER CAPITA (1996) 92.7 Brazil Venezuela Mexico Argentina South Africa Hong Kong Singapore USA Spain UK Australia Italy New Zealand Canada France Germany Netherlands Switzerland Belgium Japan Sweden 48.6 45.3 39.4 32.8 13.3 12.4 11.6 10.2 9.8 "9.5 08.2 S7.4 7.3 N7.3 S6.8 16.7 5.6 15.5 15.5 4.2 Source: Towers Perrin Consultants, 1996...
...Elites have loosened their material and symbolic links to any particular country, any particular polity or any particular citizenship, becoming increasingly committed to corporate interests and goals and even to the country that houses the headquarters of the corporations they work for...
...the omnipotence of bureaucrats...
...It is the poor who bear the brunt of recession through job loss, downgraded working conditions, declining real wages, small-business bankruptcies and so on...
...These components of citizenship do not easily coexist with extreme and persistent inequality...
...It is now the state, through "targeted" social policies, which directly fills the void left behind by the retreat of unions and parties from the daily needs of their constituencies...
...GDP figures are from World Bank, World Economic Report 1996 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, 1996...
...A decade of neoliberal, market-oriented reforms has brought about the reactivation of private investment and economic growth together with an overwhelming deterioration of living standards and the impoverishment of large numbers of people...
...The relation of representation which is central to any electoral democracy has moved from a link between government and citizens, to a link between government and these financial institutions...
...it is nurtured by the objective evidence that there are no legal sanctions for breaking the law...
...Vilas, et...
...XXX, No...
...When impunity exists, it tends to permeate the entire social structure, even while manifesting itself in quite different forms: pervasive tax evasion particularly in the upper levels of business corporations...
...4, January/February 1997, pp...
Vol. 31 • July 1997 • No. 1
